Indeed so - though not only of the library. Government in general is limited in pay bands that do not even begin to compare to private industry, so it relies on people who are altruistic if they’re any good.
> The amount of skilled altruistic It professionals is vanishingly tiny.
That's completely untrue. The IT industry is full of altruistic individuals, in fact almost the entire open source movement proves you wrong.
What's relatively unusual is this new crop of 'all that matters is TC' types who view the industry as a means to get loaded and who do not, in any way shape or form, embody the hacker ethos and the mentality of putting something out there for the public good because that's just the type of person they are.
The industry has been taken over by utterly despicable greedheads and that's why so much of it has become the way it is, unfortunately.
> What's relatively unusual is this new crop of 'all that matters is TC' types who view the industry as a means to get loaded and who do not, in any way shape or form, embody the hacker ethos and the mentality of putting something out there for the public good because that's just the type of person they are.
I said that people working a job should be compensated fairly. So they have a roof over their head, and don't worry about where their next meal will come, or what will happen with them when they are old. I'm glad that from here you jumped to the conclusion that 'all that matters is TC'.
The free-software community is vanishingly tiny; the slightly larger opensource one was built on the principle of not forcing anyone to be as altruistic as them (i.e. made it ok to be less altruistic). In both cases, the overall amount of actual participants is a small niche when counted against the totality of IT professionals. 90% of professionals literally just take.
I've been around since the late 90s and I reckon the greedheads have always been around. The difference is that they used to be easily recognizable by their suits, and now they are not.
The amount of not-very-good IT professionals, on the other hand...